Summary
This summer I have been quite silent on Artima. Here is an
update of what I have done and what I plan to do in the future.

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In the latest couple of months I have been quite silent on Artima;
actually, I have only published episode #30 of my Adventures which
was originally written a long time ago.
The main reason is the Italian summer: with a temperature of 35 degrees
Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) I do not feel very motivated to write and I
spend my weekends on the beach. Also, I spent a couple of weeks of
vacation in Montreal in July (and it was really cool there, in the
literal sense of the world!). Plus, I discovered
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I bought all the
currently published volumes (in the French edition, which means
12 volumes for a total of 5,000+ pages) and I read of all them
in four weeks. I used to read a lot when I was young, but in the
latest ten years or so I have nearly stopped reading fiction: I had already
read all the classics and I could not find recent things worth reading.
But Martin is good.

I have not been completely lazy this summer, and I have found the
time to upload a new release of my decorator module to PyPI.
Actually, I had to upload it twice. My first attempt (release 3.1.0)
was accidentally breaking Pylons. The problem was immediately
reported (thanks to Gabriel de Perthuis!) and fixed the day after.
You are encouraged to download release 3.1.1 and to forget about
3.1.0. There are various internal changes but not many user level
changes, except the addition of a new
convenient API to dynamically generate functions (FunctionMaker.create).
This is mostly intended for framework authors. For instance in SQLAlchemy
there is a machinery to instrument classes, which involves adding
properties corresponding to database columns and also redefining
the constructor __init__, by preserving the original signature.
This is done without using the decorator module, but using the same
techniques. If you want to play this kind of games,
FunctionMaker.create will simplify your life a lot. You can find
examples of use in the documentation, so I will not insist on it here.
Instead, I will comment on an user request I had two months ago
from David Laban. He wanted an easy to define decorator factories.
I have thought a lot about that - I had the same request before,
I implemented a solution in version 2.3 and removed it in version 3.0 -
but at the end I have decided not to include the feature.
The reasons are that I want to keep the API small and that I do not want
to add even mor magic. Moreover, I am strong believer in the "there must
be only one way" mantra. Finally, it is not difficult to define decorator
factories with the current functionality anyway. So, I have added
to the documentation a recipe (actually a one-liner) to implement
decorator factories on top of the pre-existing functionality.

What about the Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland? I am taking
a pause from them for a while, to recover my energy. My blog never
wanted to be Scheme-only. I have updated the table of contents and uploaded
the full PDF version on my site. This is the good moment to re-read
the Adventures if you have lost the pace and need some time to digest all
the material I have published until now. I must also think about how
to continue the series. A few weeks ago Kent Dybvig released the fourth
edition of The Scheme Programming Language which is updated to
R6RS Scheme. I have to read to book, since it makes no sense for me
to talk about things which are already covered there.
Anyway, I still have a lot of things to write and soon or later I will
resume the publications (hopefully with a more clement weather).
BTW, there are important news in the Scheme world: just today the
Steering Committee for the next version of Scheme (R7RS) made
a statement about their vision for the Scheme language evolution.
You can find it here. A few relevant excerpts tell everything:

A programming language stays healthy and vibrant by virtue of being
used. When it comes to using Scheme, however, the Scheme community has
rarely missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity

We believe that one primary purpose of a programming language is to program

Scheme has the unhappy distinction of being the world's most
unportable programming language

We believe the diversity of constituencies justifies the design of
two separate but compatible languages, which we will (for now) call
"small" and "large" Scheme

All this makes a lot of sense to me. I hope the editors will make a better
job than what was done with the R6RS. Still, I am always skeptical when
it comes to languages designed by committed. See the following worlds from
Marc Feeley when we spoke in person at the EuroLisp Symposium in Milan:

I do not believe in languages designed by committee
[Marc Feeley, appointed member of the R7RS Scheme committee]

I would direct you to http://www.sqlalchemy.org/trac/ticket/1152 where we discussed moving over to the decorator module. Since your new features seem to at least partially have SQLAlchemy in mind, if we can in fact make a clean switch to decorator fully this is a good time to do so, as we're getting ready to release beta versions of 0.6. I'll have a look soon !

I read (part of) the source code of SQLAlchemy some times agoand I saw that you were basically using the same approach ofthe decorator module. I have always been curious if this wasan accident - I know of at least another guy reinventing the samething in an independent way - or if you simply adapted thedecorator module - the Turbogears guys did that in the past.

Anyway, if you are worried about the stability and reliability of the decorator module, stop worrying: its basic functionality is unchanged since day one and I never had any complaintor bug report. The only accidental breaking ever happenenedthe other day and it was solved in 24 hours. Version 3.0 had morethan 16,000 downloads in eight months, probably because it isincluded in Pylons, so that lots of people are using it,without knowing it, I guess.

I do not have much use cases for the decorator module myself, so thatI have little motivation to add new features and there are relativelyfew releases. Recently we started a large refactoring project at work,involving mapping all our database tables with SQLAlchemy objects, andI had to generate dozens of business classes with custom __init__methods. I decided to enhance decorator.FunctionMaker to do that forme. This is the real motivation for version 3.1. After that, whiledebugging some code and by looking at the source code of SQLAlchemy inattributes._generate_init, I saw that you could make good use ofFunctionMaker.create too. This is the reason for the remark in myblog post.

BTW, if you find that the decorator module is lacking and you needsome additional feature to make it easier the integration with SQLAlchemy,let's talk about it. If a small change can make my users happier, andit is not against the philosophy of the decorator module I am willingto implement it.